ELT Materials Development and Curriculum Design

Now that we’re well into March, my thoughts are very much on the upcoming IATEFL conference in Brighton. For well over a decade now, the annual conference has been one of the highlights of my professional year. As I’m making plans for Brighton, I’m thinking about how m...

Every time I come to a CPD event in the UK, I can guarantee that I will be asked the same question by someone: ‘Did you come all the way from Canada just for this?’ I have now been to the ELT Freelancers’ Awayday three years running, and yes, I do come all the way from...

Five years ago, on the first day back to school after the Christmas holiday, my husband and kids left the house, and I commuted to my basement office and began my freelance career as an ELT materials writer and editor. I started out with two projects: a curriculum cons...

A few months ago, something strange happened: I found myself inundated with enquiries about my availability. I don’t know whether the stars had aligned, my networking was paying off, or everyone else was just too busy – but for a few weeks I kept finding potential oppo...

One of the first rules of writing educational materials is to know who you are writing for. Know who your learners are and what they need, and then figure out the best way to give it to them. As a writer, I have always had a clear understanding of my audience – until n...

I’ve recently seen a couple of people in different Facebook groups asking the same question: “How can I find editorial work in the UK when I don’t live there?” I come from the UK, I live in Canada, and over the last five years I have written and/or edited ELT and other...

This blog post was originally published on the MaWSIG blog in September, 2016. In this post, I describe the process of writing an EAP coursebook for a Canadian publisher; the goal was to appeal to both the Canadian and international markets. This meant paying careful a...

This is another blog post originally published by MaWSIG in December, 2016. This is a look back over a year in my life as a freelancer - the ups and downs, lessons learned, and future plans. To read the post, click here.